Free Motion Friday - Jennifer's Abstract Colour Wheel Quilt

Happy Friday!!! Today I'm talking about Jennifer's quilt. 

So here's the deal. I love this quilt. I in no way have the patience to actually make it, but I love it.

The thing about modern improv quilts, is that like, 99% of them are quilted with straight line organic matchstick quilting. Or at least straight line. There just aren't that many that I have seen that are fully custom quilted.

And I was determined that it could be done. That there is no real reason why improv quilts HAVE to be matchstick quilted. That I can quilt one using all my favourite designs, and that it would suit just fine.

So here is my planning. I wanted to avoid the outside negative space to be quilted in only right angles, so I decided to use the angles pieced in some places, and use the quilting to extend them through the negative space.

Here you can see that portion quilted out. (And you can see that I'm a much better at quilting than drawing!)

I used a lot of my favourite designs to follow the piecing along its path. My flying geese,  Claudia's Pfeil's Onion peel, circles, ribbon candy, straight lines, bubbles, triangles...

At the end of the day, nothing I did on this quilt was "hard." I used simple designs, used the piecing as my guide, and it turned into a pretty awesome quilt.

(Which, PS, is what my "Draw like Kathleen" class is all about -- September 25 @ Sparrow Studioz in Edmonton! Maybe I'll see you there?)

I really didn't want the quilting to look... uniform, or planned... or some word like that. So on the yellow strip in the picture, you can see I quilted a random "X" into the strip, and then changed directions of my straight lines closer to the end. Keeps things from getting boring.

EDIT: I had a question, that I thought I'm mention -- did I use one thread colour or did I match? The answer? I matched. I used 23 different thread colours in this quilt. Which is more than any other quilt. And quite probably more than I ever will again. 

That's it for me this week! If you'd like your quilt to be a part of FMF, email a picture of it to kathleen(at)kathleenquilts.com

Later days! Kathleen.

Free Motion Friday is Sponsored by Sparrow Studioz and APQS Canada. I’m teaching there September 25 & 26 2015 — hope to see you then!